About Us

Best Practices for Using Quantcast Choice

Shirley Jiang

Senior Product Manager

At Quantcast, respect for privacy is woven into the fabric of our business. This inspired us to be one of the driving forces behind the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) and build one of the first ever consent management platforms (CMPs), based on the standard. The result, Quantcast Choice, has so far helped thousands of brands and publishers respond to requirements stemming from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy Directive (ePD).

After the 2018 launch of Quantcast Choice, which quickly became Europe’s leading IAB-compliant consent management platform (CMP), over 25,000 publishers from over 25 countries have implemented the tool to help them meet GDPR and ePD compliance challenges.

During the development of Quantcast Choice, we worked with and took feedback from hundreds of publishers. Today, Quantcast Choice offers a scalable, easy-to-use solution for providing users with information and expressing their preferences related to privacy and data protection. With the flexibility to adapt to local rules and regulations, platform requirements and publisher-specific configurations, publishers can easily configure the CMP according to their needs.

Quantcast Choice is provided for free to help publishers of all sizes cost-effectively provide users with the information and controls they are entitled to under privacy and data protection laws. As more and more domains have deployed Quantcast Choice over the past two years – three million so far – we’ve heard some recurring questions from publishers about how to do it right. Below are some best practice recommendations that publishers tell us are most valuable when using Quantcast Choice. We hope they help more publishers avoid some common mistakes. As a reminder, we’re unable to provide legal advice and always recommend publishers and brands consult with their own legal counsel.

Best Practices for Using Quantcast Choice

Choice comes first: Implement the CMP in the website header so that you gather users’ consent before any other tags are loaded. Most tags require consent before they can be used lawfully. Tags should look for the presence of a CMP to adjust their behavior dynamically depending on the user’s choices. This only works if the CMP loads before any other tags.

Keep Choice up to date: We regularly publish updates to Choice to fix bugs, or change and update functionalities in response to new best practices, regulatory opinion, and case law. All versions are listed on our Help Center.

Don’t modify Choice’s source code: Not only is doing so against our terms of service, but you run the risk of breaking or circumventing carefully considered elements that, when changed, may result in your and your partners’ non-compliance with the law.

Privacy by Default: If you are in doubt about what privacy and data protection laws require you to do, leverage Choice’s default configuration settings. We have carefully tuned the default to help reduce risk of non‑compliance.

With great customizability comes great responsibility: Only change defaults after carefully considering the implications and after having consulted with your privacy and/or legal team. Even something as basic as changing the color scheme of the CMP can have severe consequences. For example, if you inadvertently change the color of text or buttons to become hard to read or invisible against their background.

Keep the persistent Recall CMP link: Users must be able to withdraw their consent at any time, the persistent Recall CMP link is the easiest way to achieve that. Only remove the persistent Recall CMP link if you have added the link in another place in which the user would expect to withdraw their consent.

While we strongly encourage that these defaults are used, website owners ultimately retain control over the customization and presentation of Quantcast Choice on their properties.

We will be working on providing publishers with updated best practices. Protecting user privacy remains integral to our business; and as a leader in the industry, we are continually iterating and improving upon the functionality of our solutions, as well as the way we work with our customers. Just as we’ve grown and evolved with the industry over the past decade, Quantcast is dedicated to working alongside publishers, advertisers, policy makers and industry peers to drive progress and empower users to make informed choices about how their personal data is used.

If you’re interested in learning more about Quantcast Choice, visit here.